I'm now have trepidation about closing, since that's the first step to deletion, and we all know how that's been going. I have always tried to do my part to close questions that deserved it, but feel that good answers shouldn't be deleted. In reference to the cases that Greg brought up, I would one day like to find the time to study functional programming more, and read those answers.

It also helps for people to find those questions in a search, and not create another one.

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This discussion, spread as it is over three? four? threads, is developing a bit of a whack-a-mole character. Nonetheless:

There appears to be a universal consensus that we need to stop deleting questions as duplications when we haven't made arrangements to preserve good answers. Someone is still regularly nominating dups for deletion. Several of us are routinely flagging for mods when we see them in the delete pending queue. If there are still good answers leaking out this way then it's strong argument for your merge feature, or more diamond supervision of the delete queue. A diamond can always lock a question closed for deletion to preserve good answers.

That leaves Subjective&Argumentative, NotARealQuestion, and OffTopic questions. I am very much with John Saunders on the appropriateness of deleting these, regardless of the answers. Failing to delete them just encourages more of them, and leaves the perpetrators with their rep and badges, and advances the apocalypse when a whole slew of the people who love subjective questions get 10K. If that happens, SO won't be a Q&A site any more. It will be a discussion site with a few actual questions struggling to be seen on the front page.

Yes, that's overheated rhetoric.

A thought in response to a comment from Lance.

Let's be blunt. One reason to want to delete S&A questions is their traditional role as rep-magnets. I, for one, would be more comfortable leaving them around on the grounds of useful answers if the process made them, ahem, retroactively CW, or otherwise zeroed out 'ill-gotten' rep from them. At that point, the closed status makes the point that they are not the preferred activity of the site, and the advance of the muppets is slowed.

@Daniel, I probably wouldn't since I'm ok with math questions, and programmers will always need to be finding that answer. The accepted answer to that question is great, and is certainly about programming.
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Lance RobertsMay 24 '10 at 22:50

It actually passed from one vote from being deleted, to being totally open.
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Daniel VassalloMay 25 '10 at 0:43

How many current admins achieved their status through "ill-gotten" rep? A tour through many deletionists' profiles demostrates the answer is more than a few. Looks like some folks came through the door, then closed it behind them so others couldn't get through.
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JohnMcGMay 27 '10 at 18:00

I don't have even remotely the amount of reputation needed to vote for closure, so maybe it feels a lot different when you're actually in the seat of the voter. But this is what I'd do.

I would assume that the primary reason that you would close a question with valuable information that should not be deleted is if the question is a duplicate in some fashion. Until we allow the ability to migrate answers from one question to another, we can at least settle for the current option, which is to get a moderator to merge it. You have a 2 day head-start over the people who will delete it: use it, and use it early. If you don't think it's worth a flag (which we know should be used primarily for pressing matters), then bring it up for discussion either in comments on the question or as a post on Meta if it's particularly disputable. The important thing is, do it early. Make the most out of those 2 days that the question has before people can delete it.

Apologies for hijacking the thread. I just had this scene in my head when I saw the blog entry for the API contest "first prize is a 30 inch monitor... second prize is a herman miller chair... third prize is you're fired."
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Kyle CroninMay 24 '10 at 22:45

Can I just point out that there is nothing stopping the author of one of these "valuable" answers copy and pasting it as an answer to a more appropriate question . I can't believe the fits of the vapours that the thought of losing these so-called valuable answers is causing here.